Heidi K. Brandow is a painter and printmaker whose work is often filled with whimsical characters and monsters that are often combined with words of poetry, stories, and personal reflections. Hailing from a long line of Native Hawaiian singers, musicians, and performers on her mother’s side as well as Diné storytellers and medicine people on her father’s side, her pursuit of an artistic career came naturally. Drawing her inspiration from everyday life, Brandow’s work concerns discovering, defining, and redefining personal identity by questioning authority and deconstructing mainstream assumptions of Native American identity. Brandon engages personal, cultural, and historical experiences while incorporating perspectives of critical theory.

In addition to continually evolving her illustrative monsters, Brandow is a 2015 Turkish Cultural Foundation (TCF) Artist Fellow. As a TCF Fellow, she is simultaneously working on the project Defining: Home, which seeks to collaborate and document the evolving definitions of “home” for Turkish and Syrian artists affected by regional conflicts and political strife.

A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, Brandow also studied design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Istanbul Technical University in Istanbul, Turkey. Brandow is represented by Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the mother of two young boys.

Heidi K. Brandow will be in residency at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts through February, 2016.